Thanks to Tinic Uro, the principle engineer on the Flash Player, we have a hidden feature that can be used. Set both the base movie clip and the mask to make use of runtime bitmap caching, and alpha gradients will work!
View the example (Local to site, requires Flash Player 8 to view).
Example FLA. (Right click and “save link as…” to download)
I had a heck of a time finding information about how to use the Flex EventDispatcher class to generate custom events. I eventually found some information about what Macromedia calls mixins. Basically, they are a way of inserting methods into a class from another class without using subclassing. The example shows how to set up the EventDispatcher class as a mixin, but doesn’t actually show how the event handling works. I am providing an example here showing a couple of the EventDispatcher methods in actual use.
This is my second attempt at doing some scripted animation. This time I created a class to control the animation, which allows me to have multiple classes drawing to the screen at once. There are still some bugs I am working out, but feel free to take a look at what I have here, anyways. Enjoy!
This is just a little thingy I did when playing around with Flash. The rain effect is subtle, so you may not see it right away.
I had a need for a tooltip class that was lightweight and had the features I needed. I had trouble finding anything in ActionScript 2, but I found a good one in ActionScript 1, ported it to ActionScript 2, and added a couple features that I needed. With the permission of the previous author, I am making my modifications available.
I have to say that one thing that has always bugged me about Jakob Nielsen’s web site is the complete lack of visual aesthetic. The impression that I get from his site is that good usability means ugly web design. Contrary to that impression, I believe that by applying standard visual design principles such as grouping content, making headlines that are easy to scan, and using white space to guide the user’s eye, usability can be significantly enhanced.
If you want to take a look at a really nifty site that really makes good use of Flash, take a look at Eternal Egypt. I am admittedly biased, since I did a bunch of work on one of the Flash components on the site, namely the map explorer, but this site really was a huge undertaking and shows how Flash can be used to visualize large quantities of data in easy to digest ways.
I have been playing with Photoshop CS lately, and have been playing with a number of the features targetted at photographers. One adjustment that has been added is called Shadow/Hilight. It does an amazing job of retrieving detail lost in dark shadows or bright hilights. The example below shows the results with the shadow slider set to 50%:
I am quite impressed with the features added to Photoshop CS for digital photographers. I already knew about the RAW file parsing abilities, but it is a nice treat to see this one.
Bad Behavior has blocked 28 access attempts in the last 7 days.